Alternative Approaches to Auction Trading by Consortia in Multi Agent Systems

Abstract

Agent-based auction trading is important in e-Procurement as a part of the supply chain management activity of procurement via the Internet. Participating buyers and sellers are intelligent agents tasked with finding matches with required or offered quantities for best performance. Formation of consortiums offers opportunities in matching trade volumes, but in the real world, there are difficulties in optimizing consortium formation due to lack of perfect information and the dynamic character of the information. Heuristic methods are often the only solution. This chapter shows the impact and capabilities of alternate heuristic models, and compares their performances in auction trading.